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Gorilla in Prague Zoo hangs himself

The zoo said in a statement that 5-year-old Tatu was found hanging with a rope around his neck Friday morning in a sleeping room. Spokesman Michal Stastny said all attempts to revive Tatu failed. He said there were no cameras in the room and it is not clear exactly what happened. Mammals curator Pavel Brandl said Tatu likely unbraided one of the dozens ropes the gorillas use in their pavilion for climbing and put a strand around his neck before hanging himself.

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Angelina Spencer, the executive director of the Association of Club Executives, which serves as a trade association for strip clubs, said an informal survey of convention business in New York and Denver had determined that Republicans dropped more money at clubs, by far. “Hands down, it was Republicans,” she said. “The average was $150 for Republicans and $50 for Democrats.”

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Cult activity is suspected after a woman’s body was stolen from a southern New Jersey mausoleum. Pleasantville police said someone broke into the mausoleum, which has six gravesites, on Thursday night or Friday morning and stole the body of Pauline Spinelli, who had died in 1996 at the age of 98, according to the Associated Press. Police also said the body might have been taken for use in some sort of ritual.

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The United States today has a vast intelligence apparatus, on the ground, in the sky and even in space. Technically it puts the old Soviet Union to shame, and sucks up millions of terabytes of data daily. But, that doesn’t mean that what is reported is understood. The analysts seek to make sense of it but the policy makers are often so locked into templates of action and pre-formulated strategies that insure the input doesn’t lead to course corrections or changes in direction. They operate with a kind of intellectual “locked-in” disease that freezes out new ideas. The system is manned by ideologists and choked with ideology, constantly leading to so-called intelligence ‘failures’ that fill many library shelves. Yet even when post mortems are filed, few in the commanding heights of our national security apparatus is willing to look back and draw lessons. They are too busy, lazy or just hacks (as opposed to hackers.)

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Much has been made of government’s power to survey citizens using technologies such as packet capture and deep packet inspection. Even used in a limited fashion, these technologies can gather massive amounts of data on the online behaviors of individuals, and when taken together they can create an electronic profile of people’s lives. That potential—and concerns about its abuse—have driven privacy advocates to push for the repeal or alteration of laws such as the PATRIOT Act. At the same time, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies have struggled over the past decade to take all of this information and put it to use. The poor search capabilities of the FBI’s software, inadequate user training, and the fragmented nature of the organization’s intelligence databases all meant there was no way for anyone involved in the investigation to have a complete picture of what was going on with Hasan.

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Matrix director Larry Wachowski is now a ‘she’, after undergoing a sex-change operation. For some time now, the film director has been answering to ‘Lana Wachowksi’, and says she has been “transitioning” from male to female for a number of years. At a Los Angeles movie promo last week, Wachowski showed up in a gray dress and fuchsia dreadlocks, announcing in a German accent: “Hi, I’m Lana.” It isn’t known whether the Matrix director’s public switching of genders is complete yet, but this was far from Wachowski’s first big public appearance as Lana: she was appearing in public as early as 2004, at events such as the San Diego Comic-Con.

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At first glance, it could be a dramatic scene from a science-fiction movie. But this giant hole of fire in the heart of the Karakum Desert is not the aftermath of an attack on Earth, launched from outer space. It is a crater made by geologists more than 40 years ago, and the flames within have been burning ever since. Welcome to Derweze in Turkmenistan – or, as the locals have called it, ‘The Door to Hell’.

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‘Women and children first’ is a myth, shipwreck study shows

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was based on the premise that crew members and male passengers stood the greatest chance of survival in a free-for-all ship evacuation, owing to greater strength and knowledge of the vessel. If men chose to sacrifice themselves for the sake of women and children, however, their survival rates should suffer accordingly. They did not. In examining 18 shipping disasters dating to the 1850s, the economists found little evidence that men were inclined to surrender their survival advantage. Overall, the survival rate was 61% for crew members, 44% for captains, 37% for male passengers, 27% for women and 15% for children.

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The opening ceremony of the Olympics was very symbolic. Although for those who lacked the eyes to see & understand it, it was a boring show compared to past opening ceremonies. This is typical of inducing & using the occult symbols within something like this. It’s there but it’s hidden. The baby that showed up in the stadium egg was the sun/son rebirth we’ve been talking about for weeks. All after the ‘exorcism’ of the scary nightmares from the minds and imagination of the children…orphans being tended to by nurses and such…symbolic of the human species being abandoned by their ‘gods’ in the myths and stories of our ancient origins.

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Daley and partner Pete Waterfield slipped into fourth place after an error on their fourth of six attempts spoiled an otherwise consistent performance. Soon afterward, Daley reposted a message from a Twitter user called Rileyy69 that read: “You let your Dad down, I hope you know that.” [ Related: American athletes defy IOC ban on social media use to promote sponsors ] Daley added his own message to the retweet, saying: “After giving my all, you get idiot’s (sic) sending me this.” Daley has more than 780,000 followers and following his response, his Twitter tormentor was bombarded with messages from angry fans. Yahoo! Sports understands he then threatened one of the respondents, while claiming he would “drown” Daley. He later tried to backtrack by sending an apology. Police were already preparing to get involved by that point, though, as part of an ongoing crackdown by British law enforcement on social media abuse, particularly that directed toward high profile figures.

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The end of the world is nigh. Or so you might think if you immersed yourself in American popular culture. From TV adverts to Hollywood movies, depictions of post-apocalyptic worlds are everywhere. There is a long tradition of such apocalyptic thinking in the US. But as Matthew Barrett Gross and Mel Giles argue in their book The Last Myth, it has now moved beyond religious prophecies into the secular world. The authors also claim that activists from both the political left and right have embraced apocalypse thinking, issuing dramatic warnings that everything from the traditional American way of life to the very existence of the planet is under threat. Barrett Gross spoke to the BBC in Utah to explain why he believes the rise of apocalyptic thinking prevents some people from trying to reach more pragmatic solutions to 21st Century problems.

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The pills, made by Proteus Digital Health, have sand-particle-sized silicon chips with small amounts of magnesium and copper on them. After they’re swallowed, they generate voltage as they make contact with digestive juices. That signals a patch on the person’s skin, which then relays a message to a mobile phone given to a healthcare provider. It’s only been approved for use with placebos right now, but the company is hoping to get it approved for use with other drugs (which would be where it would get the most use).

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Is the Sky Blue?

A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors. It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither The Odyssey nor The Iliad included any references to the color blue. In fact, it turns out that, as languages evolve words for color, blue is always last. Red is always first. This is the case in every language ever studied. Scholars theorize that this is because red is very common in nature, but blue is extremely rare. The flowers we think of as blue, for example, are usually more violet than blue; very few foods are blue. Most of the blue we see today is part of artificial colors produced by humans through manufacturing processes. So, blue is the last color to be noticed and named. An exception to the rarity of blue in nature, of course — one that might undermine this theory — is the sky. The sky is blue, right?

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It’s a virus that originated in birds, but the newest strain of avian flu has killed 162 harbor seals in New England and scientists warn it could be even more dangerous if it jumps to humans. Researchers revealed on Tuesday that the aquatic mammals, which washed up dead or dying on the shores of Maine and northern Massachusetts last fall, were infected with the H3N8 strain of influenza. The seals suffered horrifying skin lesions, a previously unknown symptom in flu deaths, and pneumonia as a result of a virus that they contracted from North American waterfowl, according to researchers at Columbia University. Even more worrying is the fact that the virus has mutated to develop the ability to infect the cells of mammals — a first for the avian pathogen.

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Thomas Pugh and colleagues explain that concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and microscopic particulate matter (PM) — both of which can be harmful to human health — exceed safe levels on the streets of many cities. Past research suggested that trees and other green plants can improve urban air quality by removing those pollutants from the air. However, the improvement seemed to be small, a reduction of less than 5 percent. The new study sought a better understanding of the effects of green plants in the sometimes stagnant air of city streets, which the authors term “urban street canyons.” The study concluded that judicious placement of grass, climbing ivy and other plants in urban canyons can reduce the concentration at street level of NO2 by as much as 40 percent and PM by 60 percent, much more than previously believed. The authors even suggest building plant-covered “green billboards” in these urban canyons to increase the amount of foliage.

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Rochester, NY Police officers Rob Osipovitch and Ryan Hartley, falsely accused Mr. Barideaux of failing to come to a complete stop in order to have a reason to pull him over. But thanks to the power of video, Osipovitch and Hartley never stopped to think that City of Rochester traffic cameras were recording the whole incident. And that the video recorded their lie. After the illegal stop and search of Mr. Barideaux’s vehicle, the Rochester Police Department claims that the officers found drugs and a weapon. After spending four months in jail, Monroe County Court Judge Daniel Doyle dismissed all charges against Barideaux. In his decision to dismiss the charges, Judge Doyle said “it was an unreasonable stop… based on the review of the video, there’s no ambiguity at all that a car being operated by Jeramie Barideaux did come to a complete stop before the police stopped the vehicle.”

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The face is pretty unmistakable: The features look strikingly similar to the now iconic visage that’s been burned into our collective consciousness over the past ten days. But this face doesn’t belong to the person alleged to have shot seventy people at an Aurora movie theater just after midnight on July 20. This one belongs to a promising San Diego-based singer/songwriter named Chris Holmes, who just happens to share a surname — and a gene pool — with a suspected mass murderer: James Holmes, who’ll be back in Arapahoe County District Court this morning.

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On average, according to the organization, a multiple-victim shooting happens every 5.9 days in the United States. The deadliest city in this period, according to the data, is Chicago, with 17 shootings since 2005—totaling 72 people wounded and 30 deaths. Thirteen of those shootings were in a public place. New Orleans, Kansas City, and Philadelphia were tied for second bloodiest, with nine shootings in this seven-year period. Plus, James Warren on why the Colorado shooting is tragically unsurprising. Thanks Jasmine

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“Facebook will become the poster child for the current social-media bubble,” warns economist Gary Shilling in his latest Forbes column, “just as Pets.com was for the dot-com bubble.” Yes, Wall Street is repeating the 2000 dot-com crash as today’s social-media bubble crashes and burns.

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The decentralized nature of the Internet, and the fact that the global network is built from a thicket of independent public and private networks, is limiting efforts to protect against such attacks, said Alexander, because it doesn’t allow the NSA or law enforcement to easily track Internet activity. “We do not sit around our country and look in; we have no idea if Wall Street is about to be attacked,” said Alexander.

Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet. EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief supporting Aereo this week.

Police executed a search warrant on Wednesday morning after a call from the Kinyua family in which the brother said he found two metal tins containing a head and two hands in the laundry room of the house. During their search, police reportedly retrieved the head and hands. They also found more body parts inside a dumpster a few blocks away. When they interviewed the suspect, police said Kinyua admitted to cutting up the victim with a knife and cannibalizing the heart and portions of the brain. Although the body parts had yet to be identified by the chief medical examiner, authorities believe they belong to Agyei-Kodie, said sheriff’s spokeswoman Monica Worrell.

After the first no-hitter in New York Mets history, SNY caught a special glimpse of the team in the locker room afterward. Ironically, this is during an interview with a player named R.A. Dickey.

A man who filmed himself chopping up his lover before posting body parts to politicians was being hunted across Europe last night. Luka Magnotta, who is suspected of cannibalism, flew from Canada to France a day after placing gruesome footage of the murder on the internet. Police fear the gay porn star may now have slipped into Britain. Six months ago, he was living in a £40-a-night room above the Fusilier Inn in Wembley, North London, while sightseeing in the capital.

By now almost everyone knows (I hope!) that LA has a subway system. But did you know that this is not the first subway that LA has ever had?

Seriously, is there anything that says “we have zombies” more than the CDC denying we have zombies? The web chatter started in earnest last weekend, when a gruesome story out of Florida went viral, in which an apparently psychotic man attacked another, chewing the second’s face for nearly twenty minutes before police were forced to fire off a full clip at the assailant, eventually killing him. (It was reported that the attacker carried on chewing his victim’s flesh after having been shot, which is a behavior many associate with zombie tropes on TV and in film.) But it wasn’t just the Florida face-chewing incident that got web searchers buzzing. Another incident involved a doctor who began spitting blood at arresting officers during a traffic stop and was difficult to subdue afterwards at the hospital, and a few incidents in which hazmat teams were dispatched to schools after reports of unexplainable rashes popping up among large numbers of students.

“[Please retweet] I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen …Will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.” Just days after Sugiyama’s 22nd birthday, the artist underwent elective genital-removal surgery, divvied up the severed penis shaft, testicles, and scrotal skin between five people, and garnished it with button mushrooms and Italian parsley. On April 13, five of six diners who signed up for the $250-a-plate feast, sat down to dinner. The sixth person was a no-show.

Media outlets are reporting that Rudy Eugene, a.k.a. the “Miami Zombie,” who chewed a man’s face off (and even ate his eyeballs) did so because he was “overdosing” on bath salts, “a new potent form of LSD,” and maybe also cocaine. These reports are based entirely on speculation by police spokesmen and media excited to fan the flames of fear in Miami. No toxicology tests were performed, no drug paraphernalia found on the scene. Bath salts are not “the new LSD,” and calling them the new LSD is propaganda for the media to gobble up. Bath salts and LSD have almost nothing in common chemically, and there is no hard evidence (outside of one police spokesman’s speculation) that Rudy Eugene was high on anything. Not only are his statements not supported by science, they are at odds with common sense. But the media love a good drug scare story, so they’re repeating the statements of one Miami cop, Armando Aguilar.

New findings from the Monell Center reveal that humans can identify the age of other humans based on differences in body odor. Much of this ability is based on the capacity to identify odors of elderly individuals, and contrary to popular supposition, the so-called ‘old-person smell’ is rated as less intense and less unpleasant than body odors of middle-aged and young individuals.

A loose coalition of eco-anarchist groups is increasingly launching violent attacks on scientists. A group calling itself the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front has claimed responsibility for the non-fatal shooting of a nuclear-engineering executive on 7 May in Genoa, Italy. The same group sent a letter bomb to a Swiss pro-nuclear lobby group in 2011; attempted to bomb IBM’s nanotechnology laboratory in Switzerland in 2010; and has ties with a group responsible for at least four bomb attacks on nanotechnology facilities in Mexico. Security authorities say that such eco-anarchist groups are forging stronger links.

Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, is being reintroduced into DC Comics in a big way: as the main superhero of the parallel-world Earth 2, and as a gay man.

If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs. If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009. Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread. Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010. Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors. A new study just published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology tracked the chemical composition of legal highs as the bans were introduced.

A Catholic priest has claimed a missing schoolgirl was kidnapped for Vatican sex parties and has implicated diplomatic staff and members of the Holy See. Italian priest Gabriel Amorth, 85, said girls were recruited for parties at the Vatican and said the death of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, last seen alive in 1983, “was a crime with a sexual motive”. The priest spoke out last week as investigators broke into the grave of a known gang boss in Rome following an anonymous tip that the key to Emanuala’s disappearance would be “found there”. But so far bones which do not belong to mobster Enrico De Pedis, have not be positively identified as the girl’s. In an interview with La Stampa newspaper, Father Amorth said: “It has already previously been stated by (deceased) monsignor Simeone Duca, an archivist at the Vatican, who was asked to recruit girls for parties with the help of the Vatican gendarmes.

Obesity is a widespread epidemic, even among the homeless. While the popularized image of a homeless individual is one of skin and bones, a new study shows the reality is not so. One in three (32.3%) homeless individuals in the United States is obese, highlighting a hunger-obesity paradox. The paradox is that hunger and obesity can exist in the same person. And although a person may be overweight or obese, he or she can lack proper nutrition. Nutrition is a daily challenge for homeless people, as the foods they manage to get are often full of preservatives and high in sodium, fats and sugars. They may not have access to healthier options like fresh fruits and vegetables.

If you are thinking about tweeting about clouds, pork, exercise or even Mexico, think again. Doing so may result in a closer look by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In a story appearing earlier today on the U.K’s Daily Mail website, it was reported that the DHS has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor various social networking sites. The list provides a glimpse into what DHS describes as “signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.” The list was posted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, before suing to obtain the release of the documents. The documents were part of the department’s 2011 ’Analyst’s Desktop Binder‘ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

Germany fed a whopping 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour into the national grid last weekend, setting a new record by meeting nearly half of the country’s weekend power demand. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan opted to shut down all of its nuclear power stations and Germany followed suit after considerable public pressure. This seems to have paved the way for greater investment in solar energy projects. The Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster announced that Saturday’s solar energy generation met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs AND was equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity!

We’ve seen snake robots and, of course, tons of surgery robots (including the weird lamprey-bot), but Dr. Michael Argenziano, the Chief of Adult Cardiac Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center in New York, says we’ll soon have fully untethered snake-type robots that will crawl through the human body, assisting with all kinds of fixes and maintenance.

State prison inmates are just as likely to have sexual contact with prison staff as they are with other prisoners, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report. The report found that about 5.3 percent of former state prisoners reported sexual encounters of some kind involving facility staff. Of those, 1.2 percent reported that staff had forced them into the sex acts.

Food conspiracy theories are pretty interesting. The famous Church’s Fried Chicken chain has one associated it, and it originated in the mid-’80s. At the time, it was believed that the company was owned by White supremacist gang the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), who have always had a vendetta against African Americans. Since it is no secret that the KKK hates Black people, it was allegedly thought that these haters tainted their chicken recipe with an ingredient that would render all Black men sterile.

A Philadelphia cop was arrested over allegations that he abducted a 14-year-old girl, sexually assaulted her and made her watch him have sex with a prostitute. Police found Anthony Dattilo, 36, at a motel in the Bensalem area of the city Wednesday while responding to a possible abduction, according to the Bucks County Courier Times. Dattilo, a 12-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department, is reportedly in custody at the Bucks County prison on $500,000 bail.

A high school art teacher in Tucson is accused of having sex with four of her students. KVOA reports that Melissa Dalton was initially booked on four counts of sexual conduct with a minor on April 30. After she posted bail and was released, more students came forward with details about the 33-year-old wife and mother’s other alleged sexual encounters. That prompted police to add eight more counts, including six of sex with a minor. Police started the investigation after one of the alleged victims told his cousin he had sex with Dalton. According to KVOA, one student claimed Dalton sent him explicit text messages containing photos of her posing in front of a bathroom mirror. Dalton’s cell phone was confiscated by police, along with the phones of the students involved.

Additional testing has confirmed beach rocks that spontaneously combusted in a Southern California woman’s pocket contained elevated levels of phosphorus, an official said Friday. The source of the substance is still unclear, but an expert says it probably was manmade. Results from an independent lab matched those obtained by the Orange County Public Health Care Agency, which examined the rocks immediately after the May 12 incident, agency spokeswoman Deanne Thompson said. Lyn Hiner, 43, suffered second- and third-degree burns on her right leg from her thigh to her knee and on her right arm when the rocks set her shorts on fire several hours after her children collected them on a San Clemente beach. Hiner couldn’t extinguish the flames, and her husband suffered second-degree burns when he tried to help her.

One of the fastest ways to ruin the Internet would be to put the United Nations in charge of it. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the United Nations wants. The United Nations is now pushing very hard for complete control over the Internet. A proposal that has the support of China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran would give control of the Internet to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union.

The white haze that hangs over many major cities could become a familiar sight everywhere if the world decides to try geoengineering to create a cooler planet. Scientists have long suspected that one oft-discussed geoengineering technique — shooting tiny sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight — could turn the blue sky white. Nature has already provided a basic proof of concept. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, spewing tons of sulfate particles in the atmosphere, it temporarily whitened the sky. Now a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science attempts to determine just how big the effect from man-made geoengineering would be. Adding enough sulfate to the stratosphere to block 2 percent of the sun’s light would make the sky three to five times brighter

Jintu Gogoi’s neighbourhood in Sadiya, Upper Assam, is no longer friendly. Over two weeks ago, an army of eight-legged freaks invaded it. It all happened in the evening on May 8. Most of the inhabitants of Chaulkhowa Nagaon village had been to a Bihu function. When the programme drew to a close, swarms of spiders suddenly descended from nowhere and started biting the people. The festive mood soon turned into one of panic with people bumping into each other and tripping over empty benches in their frantic bid to egress. Jintu was bitten by one of these critters.

They were written to teach children colours and strange words but distorted versions of bouncy Sesame Street songs have been used to torture Guantanamo Bay prisons for days, it has been claimed. The staggering assertion has been made in a documentary from Al Jazeera and follows previous claims in 2008 that heavier tunes such as Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ and Drowning Pool’s ‘Bodies’ were played incessantly to prisoners at the naval base in Cuba. According to the report ‘innocent children’s songs were abused for inhumane purposes’ as music from the popular US children programme was blasted repeatedly into prisoners’ ears.

Witnesses say two men in the Brightmoor neighborhood were so passionate about the way they make Kool-Aid, they started arguing with each other over who does it better. Sadly, that fight took a horrifying turn when they both pulled out guns and started firing at each other. Again, this was over Kool-Aid. They didn’t hit each other, but two innocent bystanders suffered gunshot wounds in the soft drink shooting. Police call it utterly ridiculous, but they’ve seen worse.

This helpful hygiene education pamphlet promotes a 1950’s and 60’s line of training bras for young girls interested in growing boobies. Their sage wisdom includes: Thinnies should go heavy on cheese, bread, butter, milk. Plumpies should favor salads, lean meat, non-fat milk. Wear a bra to increase self-confidence, even if you have no breasts. Your mother will understand. Swimming, Tennis and stretching are all super for your bust line. Looking good mostly means walking with your head up, shoulders back, chest up, and stomach in. Doctors agree that the delicate glands and tissues of the developing breasts need proper support. If you’re shy or uncomfortable, just pretend you’re not. Be sure to check out the “Littlest Angel” bra with patented nylon “Gro-Cup” that expands in the event of boob sproutage. Also available: “Dainti-Teen Sanitary panty-belt.” Sorry ladies, white only.

Hop on Tumblr for a few minutes, and at least 50% of what you’ll see will be one of the following: cats, and girls in slutty poses wearing metal shirts. While I totally support girls taking slutty pics of themselves and putting them on the internet, I have to make sure we all understand what’s really happening. Brahs, don’t be fooled: GIRLS DON’T ACTUALLY LIKE METAL!

Half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad, according to the results of a new Associated Press-CNBC poll. And, in the run-up to the social network’s initial public offering of stock, half of Americans also say the social network’s expected asking price is too high.

In an extraordinary gathering of nearly 60,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, leading rabbis of the yeshiva and Hassidic world all but banned the Internet. A halachic decision rendered by Rabbi Shmuel Halevi Wosner, one of the senior rabbis in the Orthodox world, said the Internet could be used for work purposes in an office — but only if absolutely necessary, and with the use of a filter. There was no justification for Internet use at home under any circumstances.

Unless you have the time or the technical know-how to encrypt your digital communications, none of what you transmit – however personal — through a digital wireline or wireless network is “private.” Rather, through the spectacle of post-modern capitalism, the private has become public, the property of the corporation that owns your keystrokes. The digital revolution has morphed the personal into an electronic commodity; the electronic commodity is the exchange currency of an encroaching, 21st-century digital feudalism.

NSFW!

Awesome retro knee socks ‘n mary janes in mud puddles

Photos of the item, which was titled “10 Pack Trayvon Martin Targets,” showed crosshairs over a hoodie similar to the one Trayvon Martin was wearing when he was shot by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in February. The figure has a bag of Skittle in his pocket and is holding what appears to be a can of iced tea, similar to what Martin had purchased before being gunned down. The pack of 10 targets was being sold for $8.

Mike Apatow, of Milford, poses at Stratford Fire Station, Company 2, in Stratford, Conn. May 10th, 2012, where he works as firefighter. Apatow, who had a radioactive stress test Wednesday, was pulled over later in the day, in Newtown, by a state police trooper after a radioactivity detector in the trooper’s car was set off when Apatow passed. The detectors are used to help identify potential terror threats.

Q. What’s next for Anonymous? A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

Newsweek’s cover this week declares that Barack Obama is the “First Gay President,” playing on the reader’s knowledge that Obama isn’t himself gay, but his support for same-sex marriage earns him an honorary rainbow halo. The headline obviously calls back to 1998, when Toni Morrison declared Bill Clinton the first black president in The New Yorker, which at the time was edited by current Newsweek editor Tina Brown. “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas,” Morrison wrote, laying out the formula for how to declare a President has attained the identity of someone else through actions and behaviors. Newsweek’s cover has been called “controversial” and “pretty shocking,” but it’s merely the most recent in presidential firsts that weren’t for the country’s actual first black president.

General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases, according to a GM official. The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products. On Friday, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion.

After footage surfaced of Occupy Wall Street protesters in Minnesota making claims that they’ve been drugged by police officers, authorities in the state have opened up a criminal investigation. At least one Minnesota state trooper has been placed on paid leave since law enforcement officers began investigating allegations that cops arrived at Occupy Wall Street encampments and drugged protesters. Independent filmmakers and journalists in the state say that they have encountered members of local Occupy offshoots who say they have been offered drugs by law enforcement officers. Protesters who opt in to the program are stoned for free while, in turn, cops monitor the effects of the intoxicants. Dan Feidt, an independent journalist who has investigated these claims, says there was nothing that complicated about the process: “The sheriff is getting people to do drugs and then they drop you back off at the plaza,” he tells RT.

The Obama administration could easily and justifiably move marijuana to, say, schedule III, which happens to be the same schedule that synthetic THC is in, making medical marijuana legal under federal law. There would be nothing unusual, extraordinary or legally suspect about Obama doing this. The executive branch has often moved certain drugs to lower or higher schedules based on new data without Congressional involvement. In fact, multiple sitting governors have petitioned the Obama administration asking him to move marijuana to a lower schedule, so he should be aware of the flexible authority he has. Obama is not some hapless victim whose actions on this issue are constrained by congressional law. The truth is pretty much the exact opposite. Under current law Obama effectively has the power to unilaterally make medical marijuana legal.

Unit 2 we now know completely liquified. We’ve never seen this before in the history of nuclear power. A 100% liquification of a uranium core.

Private emails, meeting transcripts and other key documents reveal that both the Obama White House and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC) were well aware of just how bad things really were with Fukushima from the early days of the disaster, but did nothing to warn the public about it. In fact, NRC and the White House purposely did not warn Americans about a massive radiation plume that struck the West Coast just days after the massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan’s eastern coast. According to information gathered from hundreds of pages worth of private NRC emails, conference calls and secret meetings, key players in the Fukushima whitewashing campaign, including the NRC’s David McIntyre and Elliot Brenner, were hard at work in the days following the disaster distracting public attention away from it. By pretending that a radioactive plume did not exist while simultaneously sending out misinformation to the media

LEFT your phone at home again? A solution is at hand: make sure it is with you at all times by having it implanted in your arm. But given the opportunity, would you want your gadget to be a permanent part of you? The question may need answering sooner than you think. Researchers at Autodesk, a software company in Toronto, Canada, checked to see whether the methods we currently use to interface with our gadgets work when the device is implanted in human tissue. The answer was a resounding “yes”. A button, an LED and a touch sensor all functioned appropriately when embedded under the skin of a cadaver’s arm. The team was even able to communicate transcutaneously using a Bluetooth connection and charge the electronics wirelessly. “That’s the bottom line,” says Christian Holz of the Autodesk team, who presented the work this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Austin, Texas. “Traditional user interfaces work through the skin.”

Piezoelectric devices promise to draw power from your footsteps or heartbeat, change the channel on your TV, and complete all sorts of helpful tasks — but they generally work in the nano-mechanical realm, requiring synthetic materials to function. Now for the first time, scientists have built a piezoelectric device using biological materials — in this case, viruses. Future sneakers may come with a customized viral mat on the bottom, with millions of would-be pathogens working together to power your mp3 player.

✪ The Crown Vic is dead; Long live the Crown Vic

In September, the last of the iconic cop cars — a veteran of countless street chases, both actual and theatrical — rolled off Ford’s production line in St. Thomas, Ontario. Hundreds of Crown Vics continue to serve and protect throughout Southern California, but it’s only a matter of miles before the law enforcement workhorse passes into cop legend. Like a cockroach, however, the Crown Vic is resilient. It’s already begun quietly colonizing civilian car culture, notably in Los Angeles County, where the number now in private hands — 38,000 — is second only to that in metropolitan New York, according to auto information company Edmunds.com.

A rogue cop from the DeKalb County Police Department in the state of Georgia is in the news for the third time in only seven months. Officer Jerad Wheeler is now being investigated after kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach. No charges have been filed against Officer Wheeler for kicking Raven Dozier in the abdomen after the cop responded to a call involving a child custody issue, reports local television station WSBTV News. Dozier says she was trying to calm her brother down during police questioning after a police officer used a Taser gun on her sibling. After her brother was shot, Ms. Dozier says she started crying and questioning the officer over his actions. That’s when Wheeler is reported to have gotten violent.

SICK web trolls stole a picture of a young girl with Down’s Syndrome and posted it on Facebook with a caption saying “lose your virginity to a retard”.

Is there a secret plan to evacuate some residents of Chicago in the event of major trouble during the NATO summit next month? CBS 2 has uncovered some evidence that there is. It comes from the Milwaukee area branch of the American Red Cross. CBS 2 News has obtained a copy of a Red Cross e-mail sent to volunteers in the Milwaukee area. It said the NATO summit “may create unrest or another national security incident. The American Red Cross in southeastern Wisconsin has been asked to place a number of shelters on standby in the event of evacuation of Chicago.”

Unfortunately, the sexuality of mentally disabled people has historically been ignored or denied (Carmody 1996). Prior to the last decade, most of this population was housed in large, sex-segregated institutions with few opportunities to socialize. Society in the past has tended to view mentally disabled people as asexual or, if they appear overly affectionate, hyper-sexual (Carmody 1996). However, personal relationships and sexuality are essential to the normal development of all adults, including those adults both with and without physical and/or mental disabilities (Smith 1995). While some mentally disabled individuals may not be able to participate in the most typical societal relationship – marriage with children – they can still participate in interpersonal relationships in meaningful ways. The healthy expression of sexuality need not require sexual intercourse, and can take a broad range of forms including close friendship, physical close-ness, and nongenital contact.

Another woman who attended Friday’s function said she watched on, “absolutely disgusted”, as children were given the chocolates. “My nine-year-old grandson gave this zip-lock bag to me, put it in my lap and said to me, ‘You’ve got a willy in there Nanny’,” she said. “Then I had a three-year-old sit down next to me and she said, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ She had this brown chocolate shaped like a penis and was about to eat the top off it.

Pub landlords will be banned from posting signs reading: “Come and watch the London Games from our big screen!” Fans in the crowd won’t be allowed to upload snippets of the day’s action to YouTube – or even, potentially, to post their snaps from inside the Olympic Village on Facebook. And a crack team of branding “police”, the Games organisers Locog have acknowledged, will be checking every bathroom in every Olympic venue – with the power to remove or tape over manufacturers’ logos even on soap dispensers, wash basins and toilets.

A COMMUNITY of dwarves have set up their very own theme park — with themselves as the star attraction — and these are the latest picture from inside it. comment on this story Residents of the Dwarf Empire must be under 4ft 3 ins tall, and they run their own police force and fire brigade from their 108 residents.

The discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex. With a killer jaw and sharp claws, T. rex has long been depicted in movies and popular culture as having scaly skin. But the discovery of an earlier relative suggests the king of dinosaurs may have had a softer side. The evidence comes from the unearthing of a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found. If a T. rex relative had feathers, why not T. rex? Scientists said the evidence is trending in that direction. “People need to start changing their image of T. rex,” said Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not part of the discovery team.

THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.

A new gadget is designed to get people drunk INSTANTLY. The makers claim, however, that the ‘harm’ is limited, because you sober up equally rapidly. The alcohol is delivered via an aerosol spray, so people feel briefly drunk, then sober up. But however quickly people might recover, drunkenness can lead to accidents – and it’s also unclear how the device could be misused by alcoholics. Two American scientists designed the device – a small spray that gives you that instant drunk sensation from less than a drop of alcohol. The feeling lasts just seconds – but when it fades, you are sober and able to carry on with your day. The ‘Wahh Quantum Sensations’ delivers just a miniscule dose of alcohol – 0.075ml – directly in to your mouth, but thanks to the aerosol effect, the effect is instantaneous.

Following 9/11, news media accelerated at an amazing rate, and most companies adopted internet versions of their paper or magazines. Before this was commonplace, many interesting pieces of information from that day were most likely never reprinted again– due to false information or just abandonment by the person feeding the propaganda of a particular propagandistic ploy. ‘Part 1’ gives us a look at a ‘Terrorism Survival Guide,’ an actual print magazine which was distributed and sold at grocery stores around the country. We especially like the bio-terror section with the photoshoot of the little girl in a hazmat suit holding a Barbie with a gasmask on. We hope that they continue with this project, it’s fascinating to say the least, and possible they will uncover something most journalists and researchers have completely forgotten.

DETECTIVES are hunting a gang of men behind a string of vile street robberies across Sydney in which they threw faeces on their victims. It’s believed the offenders watch their victims withdraw large sums of cash from financial institutions before distracting them by hurling excrement on their backs. They then offer to help clean up their victims before robbing them.

Have you ever had the experience of stepping away from a novel and finding yourself thinking a little bit like the main character would? I’ve often described the feeling as being a little “book-drunk”, but I usually only experience it with really great novels. It seems to be worse when I read all or most of a book in one session. According to a story over at GalleyCat, scientists have completed a study that verifies that this experience is a common one, and that the actions of fictional characters can actually influence the decisions we make – whether we consciously realize it or not. They call the phenomena “experience-taking”, and it’s very real.

Secret closeup photos of his daughters and their friends playing in a backyard pool has landed a London father in jail for four months. The man, 44, was found guilty of the little-tested law of voyeurism in January. This week, Superior Court Justice Alan Bryant sentenced the man to four months in jail and two years of probation. It’s one of the few voyeurism cases to be tried since the law was enacted in 2005. The man’s photos were discovered in 2009 by one of his daughters when she was using his computer. The photos were of her and her friends — zoom shots of their clothed private areas. They were all in their early teens. London police found more than 6,000 photos focused on their chests, buttocks and genitals. They were filed under the initials of each girl’s name. Some of the photos were taken through the basement window where the man spent a lot of time on the computer. Police also found pictures of the man masturbating.

Tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, skunk oil, and how to deal with them.

A 28-year-old Peeping Tom’s voyeuristic tendencies proved to be a costly habit. So much so that he had to pay with his life. Ram Singh Verma, a resident of Bhashkarnagar, Kalwa in Thane, was allegedly in the habit of peeping through a little hole in the wall to watch his object of fantasy take her daily bath. The lady in question (name withheld) soon discovered that Verma had been watching her. She approached Verma and warned the man for the outrageous act, and even tried to give him a moral lesson to dissuade him from his ways. However, this did not deter Verma, and he allegedly continued to derive voyeuristic gratification as discreetly as possible. On April 28, the woman caught Verma in the act once again. She then approached his roommates, and requested them to try and persuade him against outraging her modesty. The roommates confronted Verma, and got into an argument. When the latter did not budge, they allegedly thrashed Verma and he fell unconscious.

Gender-neutral bathrooms have become a priority at The University of Minnesota-Duluth in Duluth, Minnesota, after student Blair Moses reportedly began a hunger strike. His goal? To convince the school’s administration that they are of paramount necessity. Moses allegedly stated that gender-specific bathrooms are “oppressive” and problematic, thus he took some curious avenues to ensure that more flexible facilities would be installed.

The US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the US military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil.

Fido’s expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy’s head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends.

The Voice has obtained extremely disturbing images from New York City’s jail system. These photographs—graphically showing knife wounds and beating injuries to the faces, necks, and arms of inmates—were provided to us by Correction Department sources who want the outside world to know that violence has escalated at Rikers Island.

But the disclosure raised fears among critics that the contract is close to privatising core elements of policing: “This is the latest move that seems to be designed to make the police more and more remote from the public we serve,” said Julie Nesbit of the Police Federation. “We believe simply that if you call a cop, you should get a cop, not a security guard, not a uniformed civilian nor an employee of a major international conglomerate. We believe it’s what the public expect and believe that there should be a public debate before parts of the police service are sold off to the highest bidder.”

She pulled down his pants. She used scissors first. When they didn’t work well, she went looking for the scalpels. To keep him still, she pressed her knee onto his windpipe as she crouched over him. One cut was enough. There wasn’t a lot of blood. She thought, I am going to take it off and he’s not going to hurt anyone else. She brought her father’s penis to the stove and turned on the flame. Only the smell of flesh made what she’d done seem real to her. Her stomach lurched. She shut it off, put the burnt organ in a paper towel, and bolted from the house. Later she would throw it under the boardwalk. Thanks Jasmine

Authorities said Broten and Landrum shaved the 12-year-old girl’s hair and forced her to run up and down the hill six times on Monday night as punishment for poor grades. “The parents believed this was appropriate discipline for their daughter to teach her to not get bad grades at school,” said Lt. Michael Monsrud of Fridley.

✪ Mexican authorities investigating porn video made by 6th-graders in grade school classroom

The incident occurred in late April at a grade school in the town of Calkini, which is in a relatively conservative and heavily Indian area. Three boys are seen on the video engaging in oral and anal sex recorded on a cellphone by a fourth person, apparently another student. The mother of one of the boys saw the video on the Internet and notified authorities, Kantun said. He said the video had since been taken down. Authorities didn’t announce the students’ ages, but sixth-graders in Mexico are generally 12 or younger.

Attention, perverts: if you like kiddie porn, you’ll love New York. Probably not the slogan New York State tourism officials were hoping for, but New York has (un)-officially become the Kiddie Porn State thanks to a ruling from the New York State Court of Appeals Tuesday that determined viewing kiddie porn isn’t a crime. Possessing, producing, and distributing child erotica is still illegal (sorry, perverts), but the court decided that “possessing” kiddie porn and viewing it on the Internet are not the same thing. In other words, just because you saw smut on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s your possession, and therefore isn’t illegal under the current law.

Mahoney has been in custody since December, after prosecutors said pornographic videos showing assaults on the girl were found on the computer of a then-32-year-old Texas man. She had been charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a child but yesterday pleaded guilty to one count. Mahoney also faces state charges of sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child. The federal complaint lodged against Mahoney in January describes an approximately four-minute video streamed over the internet in which the child was lying on her stomach, apparently asleep on a bed. Mahoney then knelt beside the child and sexually abused her, the complaint said. In another incident described in the complaint, in which Mahoney allegedly recorded iPhone video while the girl was in a bathtub, Mahoney told her to “lean over sweetheart, so I can rinse you.” The girl asked “like a mermaid?” and Mahoney replied “like a mermaid, sweetheart.” Sexual abuse then ensued

Heidemarie lived nomadically, trading gardening, cleaning, and even therapy sessions for food and a place to sleep. She found it liberating: “Living without money gave me quality of life, inner wealth, and freedom.” Heidemarie has written three books about her experiences. She says the first, “The Star Money Experiment” was quite successful and she passed out all the money she earned to people on the street. She waived her advances on the other books and asked the publisher to give her royalties to charity.

Various reconstructive procedures have been attempted to restore a cosmetically acceptable phallus that would allow normal reproductive, sexual, and urinary function in patients requiring penile reconstruction. However, these procedures are limited by a shortage of native penile tissue. We previously demonstrated that a short segment of the penile corporal body can be replaced using naturally derived collagen matrices with autologous cells. In the current study, we examined the feasibility of engineering the entire pendular penile corporal bodies in a rabbit model. Neocorpora were engineered from cavernosal collagen matrices seeded with autologous cells using a multistep static/dynamic procedure, and these were implanted to replace the excised corpora. The bioengineered corpora demonstrated structural and functional parameters similar to native tissue and male rabbits receiving the bilateral implants were able to successfully impregnate females.

“The state grants a 10-yuan subsidy for amino acids to each graduating senior that will participate in the gao kao (National College Entrance Exam). Any student that feels not well can go to the infirmary and take amino acids on the IV drip,” Mr. Xia explained. He said that some students had been below par recently due to the sudden weather changes in the city of Xiaogan, and the school infirmary had been packed with students. In order to spare students the trouble of running back and forth between the infirmary and the classroom and save their time, the school decided to arrange IV drip sessions right in the classroom.

For forty years, Charles Manson has survived most of his life in what he calls ‘the hallways of the all ways,’ the reform schools, jails and prisons that have been his home and tomb. His thought was born in the hole of solitary confinement, apart from time and beyond the grasp of society. In his cell, he created his own world and speaks his own language: he has concluded that there is only the mind. This DVD will relinquish to you the extreme story of the killer of all killers: Charles Manson. From convincing his followers to move into the desert to train for the apocalypse, to leading a murderous crew through a string of devilish murders, you will see and hear from Manson himself of how he created a preconceived terror based on his philosophy of life. Manson claims that the so-called ‘straight’ world outside of prison is but an inverted reflection of the underworld in which he has lived. To him, the reality that presidents and law-abiding citizens accept begins in the hermetic alternate universe of criminals, cons and outlaws. Much as simplistic historians have dismissed Hitler’s 3rd Reich as the overcompensation of a failed artist, Manson’s vision of a holy war has been generally categorized as nothing more than the jealous rage of a spurned musician.

The definition of slavery is not nearly as clear as it used to be when we could see the physical chains and whips that shackled human laborers. Therefore, it’s more vital than ever to identify the abstract ways in which humanity is confined. Here are ten signs you might be a modern-day slave

Back in January, a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology appeared to prove that ESP is real, that in certain circumstances (involving, as it happens, erotic pictures) people really can predict the future. Naturally, this got more attention than your average academic publication. At the time I talked to the author of the paper, Daryl J. Bem, who was reeling from all the media attention. Now that nearly a year has passed, I wanted to see if any replications had been published. I e-mailed Stuart Ritchie, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, who, along with two colleagues, ran Bem’s experiments but didn’t get the same results. Their subjects couldn’t predict the future. This has been noted on blogs but, according to Ritchie, he and his colleagues haven’t had any success getting their paper published.

Thousands of Twitter accounts apparently created in advance to blast automated messages are being used to drown out Tweets sent by bloggers and activists this week who are protesting the disputed parliamentary elections in Russia, security experts said. Amid widespread reports of ballot stuffing and voting irregularities in the election, thousands of Russians have turned out in the streets to protest. Russian police arrested hundreds of protesters who had gathered in Moscow’s Triumfalnaya Square, including notable anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny. In response, protesters began tweeting their disgust in a Twitter hashtag #триумфальная (Triumfalnaya), which quickly became one of the most-tweeted hashtags on Twitter.

✦ Cosmic Cycles of Violence: John Lennon and Dimebag Darrell Gunned Down on December 8

Behind the lead Beatle’s circular granny glasses and tireless promotion of peace burned a fury unmatched by most metal enthusiasts. Lennon was pissed at his parents, pissed at his bandmates, pissed at his stay-at-home wife, pissed at Her Majesty the Queen, pissed at America’s war machine, pissed at the world for not giving peace a chance. Lennon was fucking hostile. But neither Dimebag nor Lennon were as pissed as the two pistol-wielding schizophrenics who made them into rock star martyrs, both on December 8, twenty-four years apart.

A U.S.-based research institute will soon publish what it says is “indisputable” evidence that Israel stole weapons-grade uranium for its still-undeclared atomic weapons program from a nuclear reprocessing plant in western Pennsylvania. The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) will release this month a 300-page report detailing the initial findings of a multi-year research project investigating the disappearance of highly enriched uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec) in Apollo, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s.

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine’s offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company’s printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine’s lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that’s a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

SICK collectors are fuelling an appalling trade in Holocaust memorabilia – with personal items of gas chamber victims changing hands for thousands of pounds. Dolls clutched by children in Nazi death camps, money used by inmates in medieval-style ghettos, yellow Stars of David that singled out Jews for persecution — all are enough to set the enthusiasts’ pulses racing. One US website seen by The Sun offers a variety of the yellow stars that Adolf Hitler made Jews wear before they were sent off to be gassed. An armband which Nazis made homosexual inmates wear in the Auschwitz concentration camp sold on eBay recently for £97.

The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing—although not conclusive—evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.

Once the caliber, gauge and other ammunition parameters have been selected, we will ask you (by way of your funeral service provider) to send approximately one pound of the decedents ash to us. Upon receiving the ashes our professional and reverent staff will place a measured portion of ash into each shotshell or cartridge. (Please note that our process uses only a portion of the ash from a typical cremation.)

It’s an issue we and others have noted again and again: Years after the financial crisis, there have still been no prosecutions of top executives at the major players in the financial crisis. Why’s that? Well, according to a now-departed Justice Department official who used to be in charge of investigating such matters, the Justice Department has decided that holding top Wall Street executives criminally accountable is too difficult a task. David Cardona, who recently left the FBI for a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the Wall Street Journal that bringing financial wrongdoing to account is “better left to regulators,” who can bring civil cases. Civil cases, of course, can produce penalties from the banks — as well as promises to be on better behavior — but don’t put any executives behind bars.

91 year-old Al Jaffee is best known as the inventor of the MAD “Fold-In” which he started in 1964 and has been doing ever since. He is the author of 8 volumes of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. A month prior to this performance interviewed him on stage at Drew University and told him about an upcoming live comics reading I was producing. Not missing a beat, Jaffe goes “I’d like to try that.” In the car back from the talk, we decided on doing some of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions live and voila.

Domestic violence goes bad when a wanna be hustler get tries to beat up his girlfriend she turns the tables and she then winds up beating him down.

An Islamic cleric residing in Europe said that women should not be close to bananas or cucumbers, in order to avoid any “sexual thoughts.” The unnamed sheikh, who was featured in an article on el-Senousa news, was quoted saying that if women wish to eat these food items, a third party, preferably a male related to them such as their a father or husband, should cut the items into small pieces and serve. He said that these fruits and vegetables “resemble the male penis” and hence could arouse women or “make them think of sex.” Bikyamasr.com cannot independently verify the accuracy of the news item at time of writing. He also added carrots and zucchini to the list of forbidden foods for women.

Earlier this year, game maker Activision counted up that 62 billion people had been ‘killed’ virtually in online games of Call of Duty: Black Ops – including 242 million stabbed to death at close range. That’s just one title among hundreds of modern war games – most of which lack any kind of ‘surrender’ button bar switching the machine off. Now, a committee of the Red Cross is debating if gamers might be violating the International Humanitarian Law as they slaughter each other online.

“These are very talented people,” said Professor Giuliana Mazzoni, lead researcher on the project. “They can change their perception and experience of the world in ways that the rest of us cannot.” Changing one’s experience at will can be a very useful ability. Studies have already shown that hypnotic suggestions are effective for blocking pain and increasing the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

This weekend at Newsfoo, a fun little future-of-news (un)conference put on by O’Reilly Media, I proposed a session. Important sidenote: It’s an “unconference” because anyone can propose a session and structure it however they like. I proposed “Reporting the End of the World.” Quite literally, how we as journalists will do our work in the apocalypse. It is almost 2012, after all, we should be prepared. What began as a relatively fun conceit quickly turned into a discussion of very practical things, best illustrated by how our corroborating examples began increasingly to be localized apocalypses like 9-11 or Katrina. Particularly with the scenario of global pandemic, we found ourselves unearthing critical weaknesses in our abilities to do our jobs amidst catastrophe.

✦ Inside Romania’s secret CIA prison

In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania’s capital city, is a secret that the Romanian government has tried for years to protect. For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed Bright Light — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. There, it held al-Qaida operatives Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and others in a basement prison before they were ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006, according to former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the location and inner workings of the prison.

A woman who became notorious for shooting her lover’s wife in the face is hoping to start a new life as a stripper. Amy Fisher, better known as the Long Island Lolita, is moving to Boca Raton, Florida, with her husband and three children and dreams of becoming a soccer mom. The 37-year-old former porn star has secured a stripping gig at a West Palm Beach club this week, which is charging a $10 cover.